1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to electronic communities where individuals interact and exchange communications over local and world-wide networks. More particularly, the present invention relates to electronic identities and reputations established within such electronic communities.
2. Background of the Invention
Electronic communities have been used in the art to facilitate communications between two or more people. Electronic communities typically allow for exchange of information, ideas and opinions over an extended period of time, i.e., a discussion about a particular topic may be initiated by an individual posting a message on day one, and subsequent discussion participants may receive, view or respond to the message at a later date. Electronic communities are similar to non-electronic communities in that members of each electronic community can establish a reputation based on their participation within the community. An electronic community generally provides one or more discussion forums and individual forums may be dedicated to particular topics. An electronic discussion forum may allow even participants new to the forum to review past discussion messages and therefore to fully participate in the forum. Well-known examples of such communities and electronic forums include Web-based and proprietary message boards (both public and private), USENET news groups, and electronic mailing lists. These electronic communities and discussion forums support both synchronous and asynchronous discussions, i.e., one or more participants may inject communications into the discussion at the same time, or nearly the same time, without disrupting the flow of communications. This allows each individual electronic discussion forum to be rich with communications spanning a wide variety of topics and subjects.
Other communities and electronic discussion forums may facilitate more traditional asynchronous-like communications by providing, e.g., interactive chat sessions. In these electronic communities and discussion forums, participants are typically online at the same time and are actively responding to messages posted by others. These discussion forums are similar to a traditional telephone discussion in that the information in exchanged in real-time. However, a significant difference is that the electronic discussion forums are, by their nature, written or recorded message transmissions, which may be saved for historical records or for analysis at a future date.
With so many different topics and subjects within each topic, and so many participants, a significant problem arises in attempting to capture and quantify the communications. Moreover, identifying trends and predicting future behavior in certain markets based on the communications has not been possible in the past because of the magnitude of the communications and the magnitude of topics and subjects. Further complicating any analysis of communications in electronic discussion forums is the fact that an individual may easily participate in multiple forums by posting the same message in several different discussion forums, and that individuals may use more than one identity when posting.
Although most electronic communities require each user to select an identity that is unique within a particular community, there has been no coordination among the various communities to allow users to establish a single identity for use within every community. For example, an individual user in the Yahoo.com message boards (“Yahoo community”) may have acquired the identity john@yahoo.com. However, because “john” is not very unique, the individual may not be able to use that pseudonym on other communities, such as, e.g., the Amazon.com community. In this example, if the identity john@amazon.com has already been selected by a different individual, then the individual user known as john@yahoo.com would have to select a different pseudonym for use on the Amazon message boards, for example, john2@amazon.com. Essentially, an electronic pseudonym becomes the individual's identity as the user participates in various electronic communities. Thus, this becomes the only way an individual can be referred to within each community or electronic discussion forum.
The resulting problem for users is a lack of continuity of identity across the various electronic forums they participate in. That is, a single individual cannot easily establish an identity and reputation across electronic communities, even when the forums are related to the same topic. In some instances, a user may prefer such separation of identities across different electronic communities. For example, a user may wish to participate in one set of communities devoted to financial markets, and another set of communities devoted to building model aircraft. Because the there is little relationship between these sets of communities, the user may not desire establishment of a cross-community identity and reputation across both community sets. However, within each set of communities, the user may desire such a cross-community identity. That is, for example, within the various model aircraft communities, the user may wish to build a reputation as a user that provides useful information. Without a way to create a cross-community identity, the user would only be able to establish a plurality of independent reputations, that is, one for each community, with no relationship to each other.